Field of the Invention
The invention is related biometric identity verification, and more particularly to methods and systems of verifying one's identity without giving away the very identity information one is seeking to protect.
Description of Related Art
Biometric technologies such as fingerprint, face and iris recognition have been available for many years, but they have not been used in a widespread fashion, other than in select deployments for very specific applications.
One of the reasons for lack of widespread use is the perceived concern over loss of privacy in case such biometric information is misused or lost. Ironically, these concerns come at the same time as millions of personal credit card numbers, which are a widely-accepted means of performing transactions, are being lost and used fraudulently. Biometry is an otherwise excellent means of ensuring a person's identity during commercial transactions, yet people are reluctant to enroll in the first place.
Another area in which biometrics can be of great assistance is in locating missing children.
As reported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, a child goes missing every 40 seconds in the US, which is over 2,100 children per day. Another 500,000 go missing without ever being reported.
The problem of missing children is complex. There are different types of missing children including family abductions; endangered runaways; non-family abductions; and lost, injured, or otherwise missing children. Regardless of these categories, most of the missing children go through different processes (natural, voluntary, or forced) at the end of which their identity on paper (name, home address, state, even residence country etc.) is changed. This weakens the chances of law enforcement and parents locating them and their safe return home.
An estimated 3,200 to 4,600 short-term, nonfamily abductions are reported to law enforcement annually. Of these, an estimated 200 to 300 are “stereotypical kidnappings” where a child is gone overnight, killed, or transported a distance of 50 miles or more or where the perpetrator intended to keep the child permanently.
Consequently, the child might end up leaving the state or even the country, in which case, the absence of interstate or inter-country communication and database of missing children becomes a major hurdle in their recovery by law enforcement and their subsequent return to home.
The National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children in America (NISMART) reported that there are an estimated 354,100 family abductions annually in the United States. Indeed 46% of these (an estimated 163,200 abductions) involve concealment of the child, transportation of the child out of state, or an intent by the abductor to keep the child indefinitely or to permanently alter custody. Of this more serious category of abductions, approximately half are perpetrated by men who were either noncustodial fathers or father figures. Most victims are children ranging in age from 2-11. Half involve unauthorized takings and half involve failures to return the child after an authorized visit or stay. 15% of the abductions involve the use of force or violence. A substantial 75-85% involves interstate transportation of the child.
It is not uncommon for child victims of family abduction to have their names and appearances altered. They are often told lies about the abduction and left-behind parent. Sometimes they are even told that the left-behind parent is dead.
No matter the events that led a child to be categorized as missing, the typical first and foremost step in law enforcement agencies' recovery and return efforts is positive identification. Traditional methods involve manual check of photographs, ID documents, interviews and such like. These are often time-consuming, not accurate, subject to human error and can be misleading (e.g. name change, change of a child's face due to aging). It is crucial that the means of identification does and cannot change over time and cannot be changed.
Moreover, the absence of a centralized global database of missing children that is shared and fed by law enforcement agencies hampers recovery efforts in the case of international kidnappings, or even interstate occurrences.
For efficiency purposes, such database should hold identification data, as well as information on parents, home address, phone number, notes on a critical medical condition of the child (if any), etc.
Considering the fragile state of the child, as well as the parents, the identification process should be completed in a speedy manner.
There are several problems however with existing methods for recovering lost children. A first problem is that many parents are unwilling to provide to a central registry the name, address and other personal information associated to their children. Databases are often reported in the media as being lost or left in public places, and this can be a disincentive for parents to provide such full information required today for identification. A second problem is that any child-lost recovery system is only as good as (i) the number of children enrolled, and (ii) the number of law enforcement officials that actively use the system to locate lost children. Current systems are not used in a widespread fashion because they use technical and business methods that are not conducive to widespread enrollment or use by law enforcement personnel.